A system helping blind people to get character information in their surrounding environment

We propose a system helping blind people to get character information in their surrounding environment, such as merchandise information (name, price, and best-before/use-by date) and restaurant menu (name and price). The system consists of a computer, a wireless camera/scanner and an earphone. It processes images captured/scanned by a user and extracts character regions in the image by using Support Vector Machine (SVM). Applying Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to the extracted regions, the system outputs the character information as synthesized speech.